Rachel Ward likes making films outside the machine

Rachel Ward's first film was a 15 minute short about love in prison. It encapsulates much of what she is seeking in making a film.

The list includes emotional truth, allowing actors room, a story that leads you into unexpected places.

In the case of The Big House, it's a subtle but chilling ending that will stay with you for a long time.

Actor Tony Martin gives an authentic performance as a man reluctantly in love in a relationship doomed to end with the parole of his lover.

"I'm alert to what the actors do," says Rachel.

In Martha's New Coat, a young girl flees home and compels her younger sister to go with her. They sit on a bench at a petrol station. No money, nowhere to stay, nowhere to go. The little girl sings a child's song.

It was a scene, says Rachel, that happened spontaneously as the girls were waiting to start their next take.

"Very often the actors - if you take the pressure off them and let them be - will give you those sorts of moments. You have to be around to catch them."

Film making today is obsessed with cameras, Rachel feels. "We've got to this point where we can't not show off with the camera. There are so many gimmicks.

"I was watching some Charlie Chaplin the other day; a still camera on sticks. It was amazing how you could just let the camera rest and enjoy body language.

"Stop mucking around with the camera. Let the actors come to us."

Peter Handke is the master of the slow take, says Rachel, recalling a scene in which a couple enter into a hall, take their coats off, change their shoes and go off down the hall into the kitchen.

In the distance, at the last moment, he tells her how beautiful she is.

"You don't even see her. You've gone with them. You watched their body language and it tells you more than if you'd had a whole lot of close ups and a whole lot of cuts.

"We have to get back to that. It's so fresh now. What's not fresh is all this bloody intercutting.

The authorial voice

"The machine is very geared to what they perceive will hold an audience, which isn't necessarily true."

For Rachel Ward, predictability is deadly. She eshews an approach or structure, a way of casting or filming that's trite and stale.

"That's the danger we get into with the demise of independent film."

There's potential for directors to work in television, but because the medium is producer and corporate driven, "there's a tendency to thwart the authorial voice.

"It's hard to fight those obstacles and to get those voices out there without being perverted."

Rachel should know. "I just worked with NBCU, an American channel, and I had six pages of notes on a 42 minute show.

"That was just one of the partners," she says wryly. "It was a learning curve. I won't be doing it again."

The straight jacketing of US TV is in stark contrast to Rachel's experience working with the ABC for whom she directed An Accidental Soldier, a WWI story of a man who deserts and is hidden by a grieving farm wife.

Like all producers of television, the ABC is also nervous of the authorial voice, says Rachel. Wild Side is a case in point; a series vastly different in its approach, a series that people either love or hate. That makes networks nervous.

However, the ABC is much more open to the personal voice, the idiosyncratic viewpoint, says Rachel.

"Otherwise, you know where it's going to go, the iconic characters play the same role: nothing is going to surprise you.

When asked about the expression of her own voice, Rachel takes a moment to consider.

Instinct plays a large part in her directing, she says. "I'm not sure what it is that I'm doing that people respond to.

"I've always got a very clear idea about where I want actors within a scene. I've got a very clear idea about what I want the scene to achieve.

"Aesthetic is very important to me."

Beyond that, says Rachel, she can only follow what charms or delights her, makes her laugh and engages her.

"You have to go by that."

Working with a screen legend

Bryan Brown features in An Accidental Soldier. One of the first Australians to achieve Hollywood fame, Bryan is one of those actors who transcend a screen.

What is it though, that Rachel enjoys about working with her husband?

Rachel laughs but hesitates. It's a personal question about her personal life but it's also a question about the value of those iconic actors; the Clint Eastwoods and the Richard Geres, who encapsulated an era and a persona.

"I think I work with him like no other. I'm on to him," she laughs. "And I know when he's got his Bryan Brown persona on and when he's just the Bryan Brown that I know.

"I can easily say to him, 'Bryan, I don't like the way you're delivering that.' I can be very direct with him."

Bryan, says Rachel, is obliging and agreeable with all directors, "but I take a bit of the okker stuff out of him...I tend to go more for some of the other complexity of him."

And, she adds, having Bryan Brown in her film doesn't hurt at all at the box office. "It's terrific working with him."

What about that indefinable attraction that stars like Bryan, Jack Thompson, Jackie Weaver and Asher Keddie have?

"They are happy to be who they are. Everything that comes from them comes from a very solid place. They know how to interpret the material in order to fit their personas.

"Bryan encapsulates a very iconic Australian. Someone we all like to relate to."

Female directors

"I can tell when a piece is directed by a woman," says Rachel.

The difference is in what the work is seeking; what's it's looking at, she feels.

She considers for a moment. "It's quite often sexuality, actually.

"I think we're more interested in true sexuality rather than sex."

One of the facets of Accidental Soldier that Rachel enjoyed playing with was that push pull of power games and sexual games as the characters strove to know each other.

"Dances in a way.

"There is a scene with a pear. She is speaking French. He has been trying to communicate with her. She wants something and he makes her speak in English."

Male directors, of course, are also interested in subtext, says Rachel, but she feels that women are more so.

She doesn't take a psychological approach in rehearsal, instead looking for behavioural clues. "It's about recognising the idiosyncratic human behaviour that betrays us or behaviour that speaks subtextually.

"It's all about how people are behaving, when they're saying one thing but doing another."

An Accidental Soldier screens on ABC1 Sunday 15th September at 8.30pm.